


Our Holiday in Pompeii

by TrivialPursuit



Category: The Cabin in the Woods (2011)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, The Author Regrets Everything, the title is misleading
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-05
Updated: 2013-12-05
Packaged: 2018-01-03 12:47:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1070626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrivialPursuit/pseuds/TrivialPursuit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She dances on a razor's edge and waits for the world to burn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our Holiday in Pompeii

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't quite what I wanted it to be, but it's not really going anywhere so I though I might as well post it and see what happens.  
> 

They meet in freshman year. Jules and he are already dating and Dana is Jules' slightly nerdy shadow. Jules burns impossibly bright, loud and colourful and simply begging to be noticed, 'Like a firework, in a few years there'll be nothing left but ash' Marty tells him, staring a her like a man in the desert who has just seen water. They are both drunk, Marty's high out of his mind, and Curt's been looking at Dana for a little too long. Curt knows he should take offence on behalf of his girlfriend, knows he should jump up and contradict Marty but he can't, because she's his fireworks girl.

He wonders if Jules notices her friend sometimes, notices the way she positively beams whenever their professor hands a paper back to her, wonders if she sees the way Dana's hands shake ever so slightly when she puts the phone down after a long phone call with her mother, if she sees the way Dana seems to shrink whenever a fight starts, wonders if Jules sees the dark bruises under her eyes and the sickly pallor of her skin, if she sees the smiles that are all white teeth and bleeding cuticles. But he knows that Jules doesn't see, because Jules sees other things, she sees a girl with a ridiculous crush, sees an overbearing mother on the other side of the country, sees someone too non-confrontational for their own good, sees someone who stayed up too late studying, sees happiness and a bad habit. 

If Jules is fireworks then Dana is a volcano, quietly lying in wait for the moment to come where she destroys everything before quietly retreating back in to her mountain to wait for the next volcano day. She will sit and wait and watch long after the rest of them burn to ash. He tells this to Marty later, when he is much drunker and Marty just smiles.

~

Jules and Marty don't fight often. They tend to exist in a sort of cold war on all of the topics that cause friction. Marty's drug use, Marty's conspiracy theories, and The Thing That Happened Freshman Year are all verboten, though the issues are slowly being teased out around the edges, allowing Curt to get little peeks at the way things were before he knew the three of them. On the rare occasions that they do fight it's loud and explosive, the whole building hears about it and Curt finds Dana in a hastily assembled blanket fort in her bedroom doing her readings for class. 

'You seem to have a system for this sort of thing all worked out.' Curt settles into the fort next to her and she drapes some of her blanket across his lap, nudging her copy of _What_ _is_ _to_ _Be_ _Done?_ so that he can read the page. 

'Family pastime.' She smiles tightly. 

'I understand,' He lies, the words lasting like ash on his tongue, and thinks of his mother, who made his lunch and kissed his wounds until the day he told her he was too old for that sort of coddling, and his father, who would come home from a double shift and pepper his mother's tired hands with kisses.

'Do you?'

~

Dana'd always been the quiet one in a group of very loud people, and sometimes Curt hates her for it; hates the way she stares and doesn't say a word. After the shit with Professor Fuckwad, as Jules calls him, something sort of breaks in Dana, because it's not just a really shitty breakup and it's all Curt can do not to kill the man with his bare hands when he sees her hunched over the toilet bowl sobbing like a small child, the bathroom rank with the smell of bile. Dana's surprisingly forceful assurances that she'll be fine and an undefinable look in Jules's eyes are the only reason Curt doesn't do something incredibly stupid that he knows he would never regret. (It doesn't mean that he and Marty don't vandalize the professor's car beyond repair later.)

But even after Dana pieces herself back together, her smiles are made of brittle glass rather then razors. She stops fighting and starts running and a part of him hates her for it. And so he pokes and prods and coddles and protects and carefully patches up all her cracks, even the ones he creates.

~

She draws them all, one at a time, first Jules, then Marty, and eventually him. Sometimes it's formal, she asks and waits for them to flatten their hair and readjust their clothes, but most of the time it's completely random and unplanned, she would wander through wherever they were, capturing little moments in time, so there is a shelf in Dana and Jules' apartment with sketchbooks full of drawings of the beautiful smile on Marty's face when he and Jules are dancing in the kitchen, the rumple of Jules' hair in the early-morning light, the gentle bend of Marty's neck as he dozes on the couch. Curt even finds one of himself, bent over a textbook, lost to the world of War Communism and the NEP. He feels as if he's been punched in the gut when he finds the picture of the professor, not her best, certainly, though Curt cannot claim to be unbiased, though there is a certain quality lacking, through an almost forced intimacy, though some twisted form of love is certainly there.

~

  
Later, when he's smeared in Jules' blood and watching his world fall apart he sees the way Dana stops being Dana and starts being something else. 

  
('It's volcano day,' he thinks before slamming in to a wall that isn't there.)


End file.
